Carousel Beast:The Larch: Zombalupagus: Solution: Require insurance for all employees. Suddenly places will want to have people work full time again.

Better solution: make employer provided health insurance illegal.

I keep reading about how employers want to choose what kind of health insurance their employees are allowed to purchase. Apparently, some employers are even going to the Supreme Court based on some sort of insane legal theory that their employees are the legal property of their employer and that employers should get to make health care decisions for their employers.

Since it's employer provided health insurance is obviously such a problem, we should get rid of it.

Citation needed

You must not be American. Sleazy scumbag companies that are pretending to be "religious organizations" think they should be allowed to control their employee's private health care decisions. The little sleazebags are coming out of the woodwork here in America right now in their efforts to reduce freedom and increase autocratic control that companies have over their employees.

Don't blame the ACA - it's not like your employer is prevented from providing you with insurance at any hours.

But why should they? I don't create as much value as a full time employee. sure they could insure me, but they could also not utilize part time labor at all, or sponsor rockets to the moon, or give all their money away for causes that aren't worth it.

It is the ACA that is causing all of these companies to do this, and it sucks. Previously a lot of companies would give part-time benefits based on where they felt part-time created enough value to justify spending money on benefits. Now the government tells them what it is and they don't like that. It's not their responsibility to insure us, it's ours.

Really, just give your damn employees benefits. So what if your 10,000 % profit percentage is suddenly reduced to 9,999 %? Why the fark are people not demanding the heads of the businessmen who make these changes, instead of demanding the heads of the people who are trying to help them(but are then used as an excuse for the businessmen to be worse people)?

If you think businesses with fewer than 500 employees are making 10,000% profit, then your opinion about anything is not worth listening to. These businesses are being crushed by this tax, AND they have people "demanding their heads."

Wait, Staples has less than 500 employees? That must make operating over 2000 stores difficult.

This what happens when a law is passed that negatively affects businesses. They react to the law, the system reaches a new eqhilibrium, and politicians feign outrage at the entirely predictable outcome and curse the evil busseness owners.

Mentat:luxup: I'm a pretty liberal guy, but when did people start looking to jobs at places like Staples as a source of health care?

When companies started shipping their jobs to China or slashing benefits in the name of the bottom line.

I understand being in a meeting with someone explaining how to opt in to our new company insurance program which used to seem to change every year. I've been at home with the kids now for about 5 years so this is way before the ACA. A lot must have changed because back then part-time employees never had any benefits to lose. They didn't get vacation days either or tuition assistance.

I've been part of restructuring, layoffs and managing teams in India remotely for jobs that were done in house the year before. Even then, full-time was 40 hours and if Staples told everyone working 32 hours a week to top out at 25 about nobody would have given a crap news media wise.

I guess the more accurate question would have been, since when did Stapes and places like it start giving bennies to those it considered part-time staff and has anyone actually lost benefits they were previously getting because of it?

NoSugarAdded:luxup: 30 hours a week is considered full time, which many of their part time employees were putting in. Also, had you read the memo, they state that managers should hire additional part time employees to cover any shortfalls in staffing, that is the very definition of sleazy.

What are we in France? Since I got my first part-time job back in 1980 something full-time was 40 hours.

If we were in France, everyone would have health coverage and staples wouldn't feel compelled to destroy employee morale for a few dollars.

Animatronik:This what happens when a law is passed that negatively affects businesses. They react to the law, the system reaches a new eqhilibrium, and politicians feign outrage at the entirely predictable outcome and curse the evil busseness owners.

If businesses could be trusted to act like responsible parties, many of the rules they operate under wouldn't be there at all.

Thunderpipes:luxup: Thunderpipes: nyseattitude: farkstorm: Most of the people affected already have insurance. You can stay on mommy's & daddy's insurance until you are 26 years old, long enough to finish college and get a full time job. If you can't get full-time employment at 26 years old, you should have paid better attention in high school. Now suffer the consequences of your own failures.

Do you enjoy repeating right wing lies or just lying in general?

How, in any way shape or form, is this not correct? You are why this country fails. Stupid libs, making crap up.

I was covered under my mothers insurance until I was like 21 or 24 the latest. She worked for the State. I'm in my 40s now and I grew up in NYC. When did that change? Now, if your parents didn't have a good job then it was the emergency room at the city hospital for you.

I am far from a right winger.

Obamacare changed it. All libs can stay on mom and dad's government provided plan until 26. Do you read?

My comprehension is pretty good I think. The whole point was agreeing that 26 is old enough to have gotten off of mommy and daddy's plan and get your own. Your comment doesn't change that point one bit. I pointed to my own case as being a bit younger because as you astutely pointed out, it would have changed since then. I also believe that conservs can stay on their parents plan as well as libs.

Reading between the lines it all means, try to get a better job instead of a part-time position at the local box store because you have had long enough to leave the nest little one. It's not a radical idea and one that many immigrant and poverty stricken families still try to instill in their children. Do you understand?

SuperNinjaToad:In a sense it is. Obamacare like a lot of government policies assumes benevolency on the part of the practitioners. Unfortunately IRL they don't exist.. Certainly not in corporate America.

And then those same people whine when regulations have to be 10,000 pages long to think of every one of the ways they squirm out of them. QUIT CIRCUMVENTING REGULATIONS AND THEY WOULDN'T NEED TO BE SO COMPLEX!

Wow. I thought they were a business that was allowed to make decisions to maximize profit. You know....the kind of thing that America brags about. When they become a socialist entity, like our current government, they will get in line like the rest of you sheep.

I feel that the conservatives don't ever think of the long term consequences. It's maddening. If Obama...sorry, if the ACA is going to fail, let it fail on it's own after maybe, I don't know, trying to help first. It's like walking up to a little old lady and kicking the cane out her hand instead of offering her your arm to cross the street.

If it works though, what is the downside to having everyone have access to quality medial care? Give it 20 years. That's how long it would take to start to see the big picture anyway. It's not like when they tried similar programs in other states they failed miserably.

Am I really a crazy liberal for believing that if you make sure everyone is educated properly and kept healthy, you wind up with a safer society and more desirable work force many, many years down the road. It's not like it's all going to happen by next Tuesday.

Staples is limiting the number of hours part-time associates can work to 25 hours a week, a move that has drawn the ire of disgruntled workers who claim it is a way to skirt impending rules requiring companies to provide health insurance for full-time employees or face a steep penalty.

According to an early December internal memo obtained by BuzzFeed that Staples sent to its store managers, the company described the decision to curb hours for part-time associates starting with the week ended Jan. 4 as "an effort to maximize scheduling flexibility."

Pussies. My employer is straight forward with it, we got an all staff email that just directly told all part-time employees they have to keep it under 30 hours so they don't qualify for benefits under the ACA. They're not pretending.

Pay for the Best Health Care in the World® (where "best" means "most expensive") on $7.25/hr. Or less than that, if the wingnuts get their way. Roight, guv. Raise the minimum wage. Then we'll talk about paying for your own goddamn healthcare.

Why is this such a friggin issue?

Libs have no stake in the game, they don't pay, so will always vote for Messiahs, and vote for free stuff. Just not sustainable.

I'll listen to wingnuts about "voting for free stuff" when you stop baying for MOAR WAR! every time Fox Propaganda starts hyping the Emmanuel Goldstein de la semaine.

They breed like rats, they will eventually be too many for working people to support.

How's banning abortion and birth control and defunding Planned Parenthood (in Jesus' name we pray) working out for you?

luxup:I feel that the conservatives don't ever think of the long term consequences. It's maddening. If Obama...sorry, if the ACA is going to fail, let it fail on it's own after maybe, I don't know, trying to help first. It's like walking up to a little old lady and kicking the cane out her hand instead of offering her your arm to cross the street.

If it works though, what is the downside to having everyone have access to quality medial care? Give it 20 years. That's how long it would take to start to see the big picture anyway. It's not like when they tried similar programs in other states they failed miserably.

Am I really a crazy liberal for believing that if you make sure everyone is educated properly and kept healthy, you wind up with a safer society and more desirable work force many, many years down the road. It's not like it's all going to happen by next Tuesday.

it doesn't take food out of my kids mouths to help that little old lady cross the street. Obamacare does. Why should I give it 20 years?

This law was passed full of loopholes and problems. So, instead of pointing out those problems, your solution would be to play nicely like the law is a good law with no problems? To take a financial beating just for the sake of propping up an invasive, unconstitutional law? That is really your answer? Wow. Ok. I get it now.

I guess you have no idea why a business get's formed in the first place. It's usually not to be a prop for social engineering. Usually, a business gets formed to make money. To earn profits. To take these profits, and then some, and funnel back into a government mandate, kind of defeats the purpose of going into business, doesn't it?

buny101:This law was passed full of loopholes and problems. So, instead of pointing out those problems, your solution would be to play nicely like the law is a good law with no problems? To take a financial beating just for the sake of propping up an invasive, unconstitutional law? That is really your answer? Wow. Ok. I get it now.

A law that's upheld by the Supreme Court is by definition constitutional.

lennavan:Staples is limiting the number of hours part-time associates can work to 25 hours a week, a move that has drawn the ire of disgruntled workers who claim it is a way to skirt impending rules requiring companies to provide health insurance for full-time employees or face a steep penalty.

According to an early December internal memo obtained by BuzzFeed that Staples sent to its store managers, the company described the decision to curb hours for part-time associates starting with the week ended Jan. 4 as "an effort to maximize scheduling flexibility."

Pussies. My employer is straight forward with it, we got an all staff email that just directly told all part-time employees they have to keep it under 30 hours so they don't qualify for benefits under the ACA. They're not pretending.

I can top that. I had a former employer, a well known research company send out a company wide email about the great job an upstate office did in deploying and tabulating the data for an online survey they quickly put together to cover the major news event that just happened.

We were all pretty pissed when we read it in the New York office as this was send on the day we all returned to work after 9/11. I think it was the word 'kuddos' that set us off.

Mentat:This law was passed full of loopholes and problems. So, instead of pointing out those problems, your solution would be to play nicely like the law is a good law with no problems? To take a financial beating just for the sake of propping up an invasive, unconstitutional law? That is really your answer? Wow. Ok. I get it now.

What is constitutional at one point changes in time, according to the balances of the court and public opinion. Many laws that are upheld at one point are struck down at another. Times change. One day, obamacare will be sitting in a rusty heap, gathering dust. It can't be sustained. It will either fall of it's own accord, or will fall when this country collapses from within, the result of our evergrowing debt.

WhyteRaven74:Smeggy Smurf: Most grocery store chains when they're having a good year for starters

And yet Pubix which is known for how well it treats its employees is over 6%.

Sucks to be them. WinCo Foods which is a non-union company and growing faster than anybody else averages slightly over 10%. That's good because my firm charges them a fortune for architectural services for no less than half of their new stores

Forbidden Doughnut:Smeggy Smurf: No shiat. It's almost as though destroying the ability of people to afford anything was built into this abortion from the beginning

I would have preferred a Canadian-style Single Payer system, myself....

/ yeah, I know we can't have that....because it reeks of "Socialism"// *sigh*

Crap, missed that one. You can have have your death panels and months of waiting for routine care all you want. Me as a capitalist prefers to be able to afford proper care in a timely manner because I'm not a useless socialist who needs to hide behind government's apron strings like a little biatch.

Mentat:buny101: This law was passed full of loopholes and problems. So, instead of pointing out those problems, your solution would be to play nicely like the law is a good law with no problems? To take a financial beating just for the sake of propping up an invasive, unconstitutional law? That is really your answer? Wow. Ok. I get it now.

A law that's upheld by the Supreme Court is by definition constitutional.

Beat me to it. Well said. The law should not be treated like the Bible, just believing the parts you like, ignoring the parts that don't agree with you and making up the rest.

It still costs you in the form of taxes to cover health care costs and aggregate sick time loss to employers as well as a whole lot of other big word reasons that I can't think about right now. It's late.

Besides, I seriously doubt that as you type away on your computer to comment on Fark that your children are missing any meals. When they lose 20lbs because of the ACA then talk to me. If their like a lot of other kids in this country the weight loss will probably make them healthier.

ReapTheChaos:30 hours a week is considered full time, which many of their part time employees were putting in. Also, had you read the memo, they state that managers should hire additional part time employees to cover any shortfalls in staffing, that is the very definition of sleazy.

No. It's the very definition of managing resources. If the employee is going to cost the company the same as a full time employee minus any wage difference then why do that if you don't have to? Cutting the employee's hours to below the ACA mandated hourly limit gets the employer another 20 hours or so worth of labor (AKA bang for the buck) for the exact same cost as those extra 10 hours by a full time employee minus wages. The math isn't hard and you can expect to see a whole lot of this happening as the employer mandate kicks in.

On the plus side a couple of extra jobs slots are going to be created albeit at less hours worked per person. Of course all of this was known over a year ago as the regulations were promulgated and some even think that it was a backdoor way to help the administration being able to point to higher job creation numbers and lower unemployment figures because of that 29 hour limit.

The end result is that in order to maintain your "Old" cost of living you will end up having to work 2 jobs for a grand total of 50 hours a week plus whatever extra travel time that you will have to do on your own dime, both to make it worth the while of the second employer to keep you on (there are fixed extra costs to having more employees so they will need you to work as close to their limit as possible, call it 25 hours a week or so) and you're going to need those extra 10 hours of pay to buy your Obamacare plan anyway. All of this has been explained by the so-called ACA "Liars and fear mongers" before. They can't help it if the ACA deniers didn't want to listen and instead stuck their fingers in their ears.

You can also expect a lot of larger employers of full time workers say fark it, pay the fines that they will have to pay, kick the difference of what their current health plan costs them now minus that employees share of the fine back down to the employees and let them deal with the exchanges. Bonus. No more having to deal with the costs and HR headaches of managing a healthcare plan.

Lee Jackson Beauregard:How's banning abortion and birth control and defunding Planned Parenthood (in Jesus' name we pray) working out for you?

Wow....is that the best strawman argument you can create? Sounds like you've got alot of unused space between your ears. Maybe you should change your tag to Sheila Jackson Lee. At least then you could justify your batshiat crazy statements.

Smeggy Smurf:Crap, missed that one. You can have have your death panels and months of waiting for routine care all you want. Me as a capitalist prefers to be able to afford proper care in a timely manner because I'm not a useless socialist who needs to hide behind government's apron strings like a little biatch.

We've got death panels aplenty. They're called insurance companies. Insurance companies do not make money by giving you health care. They make money by not giving you health care. But it's capitalism, so I guess that makes it all right.

ReapTheChaos:el_pilgrim: FTA:"Staples is limiting the number of hours part-time associates can work to 25 hours a week ..."

"...a way to skirt impending rules requiring companies to provide health insurance for full-time employees or face a steep penalty."

one of these things is not like the other?Seems to me it would only be sleazy if they did this to full-time employees, what they are doing is creating a clear definition between part-time and full-time.

30 hours a week is considered full time, which many of their part time employees were putting in. Also, had you read the memo, they state that managers should hire additional part time employees to cover any shortfalls in staffing, that is the very definition of sleazy.

That's probably far better for the economy overall, and certain retailers specifically. I don't patronize a lot of places I used to because they cut their staffs down to one or two people at a time, causing bad blood and walkouts costing a company real money. (Instead of fixing they just cut hours more.)

buny101:I guess you have no idea why a business get's formed in the first place. It's usually not to be a prop for social engineering. Usually, a business gets formed to make money. To earn profits. To take these profits, and then some, and funnel back into a government mandate, kind of defeats the purpose of going into business, doesn't it?

So what, the ACA means the death of all future and current business? Ok, don't go into business. I'm sure it was the ACA that is keeping you. Wait, but you are probably a small business owner so I guess you are doomed. That does suck but most small business fail with or without the ACA.

Somehow I think business will survive. When they ended child labor I'm sure that cut into profits as well. More than the ACA I'm sure. I mean, it was child labor! They worked for like nothing.

according to staples official numbers http://investor.staples.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=96244&p=irol-fundIncomeAthey make no money, negatives actually....however if you go back every year before this one they were about 3/4 of a billion. even in 2009 during the massive recession. So why are in the red this year? A major acquisition or they are cooking the books. Quick I need an analysis here!

buny101:Mentat: This law was passed full of loopholes and problems. So, instead of pointing out those problems, your solution would be to play nicely like the law is a good law with no problems? To take a financial beating just for the sake of propping up an invasive, unconstitutional law? That is really your answer? Wow. Ok. I get it now.

What is constitutional at one point changes in time, according to the balances of the court and public opinion. Many laws that are upheld at one point are struck down at another. Times change. One day, obamacare will be sitting in a rusty heap, gathering dust. It can't be sustained. It will either fall of it's own accord, or will fall when this country collapses from within, the result of our evergrowing debt.

Well you know "change" wasn't exactly explained. Change for the worse is the last thing most people thought.

lewismarktwo:I'm a pretty liberal guy, but when did we start seeing all people as equals worthy of respect?

So not expecting employers to give health insurance to part-time employees is now disrespectful to the masses? Nobody even dreamed that 30 hours was full-time until somebody put it in the ACA, and that was of course done to try and get more people insured.

I'm sure everyone who is arguing that 30 hours qualifies for insurance from employers would have told you full-time work is 40 hours just a few years ago. I didn't realize that change until today.

Don't confuse understanding why a business would move to keep part-time employees defied as part-time employees with not seeing some people as not worthy of respect. I can just see things from more than one side.

Smeggy Smurf:Sucks to be them. WinCo Foods which is a non-union company and growing faster than anybody else averages slightly over 10%.

As I understand, WinCo doesn't accept credit cards and also makes you bag your own groceries, which could account for the difference in profit right there. Publix is also non-union, entirely employee-owned, accepts credit cards, bags your groceries for you (and takes the stuff out to your car), and usually offers a fair number of 2-for-1s during any given week.